Classical Features
Interview: Maria Luigia Borsi, singing in the Italian traditionFriday, 15 January 2010
In this era of spectacular divas from Russia, Latvia and Romania, it is often remarked that the Italian lyric soprano is a commodity in distressingly short supply. Hoping to rectify that sorry situation is Tuscany’s Maria Luigia Borsi, who will be making her London debut at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday, singing a luxuriant programme of Puccini, Catalani and Mascagni. Read more...
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The Seckerson Tapes: Vasily Petrenko's ShostakovichThursday, 03 December 2009
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as Principal Conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich Symphonies for the Naxos label. Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Mark PadmoreThursday, 26 November 2009
English tenor Mark Padmore has enjoyed a career that has seen him grow from a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, through membership of The Sixteen and Hilliard ensembles, to becoming the international Evangelist of choice in performances of Bach’s Passions across the globe. He talks about the people who influenced him – William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe among them – and the prospect of Britten operas in waiting. Padmore is currently enjoying a year-long residency at the... Read more... |
Why Kipling Scuppered Elgar's Sea-SongsMonday, 09 November 2009
Elgar’s flag-waving nautical song-cycle The Fringes of the Fleet was performed to packed houses up and down the country in 1917, then sank virtually without trace for the next 90 years. As the work receives its first professional orchestral recording since Elgar's own, Tom Higgins, the conductor of the recording, explains how the work came into being, and why Rudyard Kipling had it banned. Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Messiah, ENOThursday, 05 November 2009
With its powerfully emotive stagings of Bach's St John Passion and Verdi's Requiem English National Opera has built something of a reputation for bringing sacred masterworks to the secular stage. Award-winning director Deborah Warner, conductor and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings, and ENO's indefatigable chorus master Martin Merry tell Edward Seckerson about the challenges of making a credible stage spectacle... Read more... |
Interview: William ChristieTuesday, 20 October 2009
"It's mostly very clipped and formal, but parts of it have been getting wonderfully wilder and wilder in the last few years." William Christie, whom I’ve met several times in the last decade, is describing his famous French garden in La Vendée, which has featured in many a glossy magazine. But he could also be describing himself. Read more... |
The Night Shift, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, QEHFriday, 16 October 2009
Go on, admit it. You’ve done it too. Someone is talking in your vicinity and you’ve turned round to give them evils. It’s a manoeuvre I’ve been perfecting for years. The classic rebuke is in the speedy twist of the neck, a withering glance in the perpetrator’s general direction (but not, crucially, into their eyeballs: too confrontational) followed by the slow, affronted turn back to face the front. For one night only, the gesture says, you are singlehandedly ruining my life. I didn't pay... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Jamie Bernstein on Leonard BernsteinMonday, 12 October 2009
theartsdesk.com presents The Seckerson Tapes, a series of live and uncut audio interviews from acclaimed broadcaster Edward Seckerson. We start with Jamie Bernstein - Leonard Bernstein's eldest daughter - who has been in London launching the year-long Bernstein Project at the South Bank. Seckerson, a long-standing Bernstein devotee and disciple, sat down for a frank and open discussion about exactly who her "dad" was. Read more... |
I Found My Horn special: The Art of Dennis BrainSunday, 11 October 2009
I Found My Horn is both an autobiography of sorts and a biography of sorts. It tells the story of those phases of my life, as a schoolboy and then again aged 40, when I happened to have a French horn in my hands. But it is also an account of the instrument's long and extremely colourful history. In the 20th century that history is inextricably connected to the name of Dennis Brain, probably the greatest soloist the instrument has ever known. Read more... |
Kurt Masur & the Leipzig GewandhausMonday, 07 September 2009There aren’t many composers or musicians who can say that they changed society. And by that I mean really changed it. Few have ever come close to materially or politically transforming their surroundings in any truly meaningful way. There are many who claim they have, or wish they had: Wagner or Beethoven in the 19th century, Barenboim most notably – but doubtfully – in our own. But there is only one musician who actually did: the conductor, Kurt Masur. Read more... |
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